LTE smartphone sales seen tripling in 2013

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Global sales of LTE smartphones will triple in 2013 to 275 million handsets, according to market watchers Strategy Analytics (Boston). When the books are closed on 2012, it estimates vendors will have sold about 90 million LTE handsets.

Much of the growth will come from the U. S, the United Kingdom, Japan, China and South Korea. Multiple operators, such as Verizon Wireless, Everything Everywhere and NTT Docomo, are aggressively expanding their LTE networks, Neil Shah, a senior analyst at Strategy Analytics, said in a statement.

“LTE has quickly become a high-growth, high-value market that no operator, service developer, component maker or device vendor can afford to ignore,” said Neil Mawston, an executive director at Strategy Analytics, noting dozens of new LTE smartphones will be launched in 2013.

“We believe [the growth] will eventually attract new entrants seeking a slice of the 4G pie, such as Amazon or Mozilla,” said Linda Sui, an analyst for the market watcher. “However, we caution possible new entrants like Amazon will not find it easy to break into the fiercely competitive market, and they will need breakthrough products that are strongly differentiated in areas such as design, price or services,” she said.

Yeah, perhaps, but so what? The LTE smartphones are largely going to be replacing 3G W-CDMA smartphones. It's not like they are creating a whole new market segment.
Sure, there will be a bump in sales as people ditch their old stuff.

I think it opens up the mobile computing segment because the data rates are a huge improvement. Get ready for an expensive data plan. What could make it more interesting is when the technology expands into other areas like TV, LANs and WANs.
The current parts on the market are not at the fastest 4G data rate. Later this year the better faster cheaper chips will come out and then the market will start to take off.

hmm - there is much more than "so what"
LTE smartphones will dramatically accelerate entry into the “mobile cloud” era --- characterized by a new wave of technological innovations and entirely new services
The ascendency of mobile computers with a phone function (aka smartphones) is only starting -- we have not seen anything yet...